Picture this: It's 9 p.m. on January 13, 2026 — a Tuesday — and you tune in to your favorite cable-news network to watch the president's annual State of the Union address.
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But this year, the president doesn't take a bulletproof limo from the White House to the US Capitol. Gone are the hundreds of members of Congress traditionally in attendance. Instead, the commander in chief is wearing an orange jumpsuit, his message streamed to lawmakers and into your living room via Zoom from his prison cell.
Yes, this scenario is equally far-fetched and outlandish — in the extreme.
But it's also possible, law experts told Insider, particularly given former President Donald Trump's mounting legal woes and his announcement November 15 that he is again running for president.
Those legal problems intensified in dramatic fashion this summer as the FBI reportedly searched his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The Justice Department is currently scrutinizing Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 US election. Officials in Fulton County, Georgia, are pursuing potential criminal charges against Trump and his associates. The National Archives also asked the department in February to investigate if Trump broke the law when he took official government records with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House.
And for months, the US House January 6 select committee has built a decidedly public case that Trump was intimately involved in the deadly attack on the US Capitol, and did nothing for hours to stop it. The committee has ordered Trump to testify, and Trump is fighting back.
If Trump landed in prison, nothing in the Constitution would block him from continuing the White House run, according to nine legal experts interviewed by Insider.